‘Plane’ talk from Poland’s Walesa

Lech Walesa was in sprightly form on Tuesday (1 June), when he visited Brussels to open an exhibition on the history of the Solidarity movement in Poland’s EU embassy.

In an apparent call ‘for less talk more action’, the ex-president urged democratic states not to think that setting up committees dedicated to every problem under the sun amounts to an effective response.

To illustrate his point, he recalled this unwieldy anecdote, which fans of the movie

Goodbye Lenin might enjoy: “Under communist rule, when we could no longer take flights, some of our citizens used to hijack planes to the West,” he recounted. “So the communists put people on planes who pretended to be tourists but their job was to make sure nobody hijacked the plane. One day a person whose job was not to hijack the plane, decided he wanted to go away, so he did actually hijack it.

“The communists then appointed new committees to stop hijacking.

“The result was the planes were now full of people from committees, so that no one could hijack them!”

There is something splendidly parochial about the state-aid investigation launched last week by the European Commission’s competition department into JC Decaux, a French advertising company. The question …